HDD Utility

[Guest]

I'm thinking this may be a stupid question, but here it goes. Is there a
tool out there that will tell you the cyl. heads and sectors of the HDD if
you only have the size of the HDD. So for example, if I have a 300GB SATA
HDD, can I find out the BIOS info with some sort of formula?

 

[DL]

Is there some reason you cannot set bios hd for auto detect?

 

[Guest]

I can, but I'm just asking to see if there is such a tool/fomula out there,
for the just in case purposes. I also, understand that the manufacture of
the HDD should have this, but again, just in case they do not. If there is
no such tool/formula then maybe someone should make one. I think it'll be
useful, but who knows....

 

[Eric P.]

I can, but I'm just asking to see if there is such a tool/fomula out there,
for the just in case purposes. I also, understand that the manufacture of
the HDD should have this, but again, just in case they do not. If there is
no such tool/formula then maybe someone should make one. I think it'll be
useful, but who knows....

There is a command on ATA devices "Identify Device" that is used by many
diskutils (often Dos programs like ATAPROBE) to read 512 bytes of
information from the device.
Among this the total number of sectors that is used instead nowadays and
a default CHS you can use to read the beginning of a disk.
(On outer tracks the number of sectors is higher than on the smaller
inner tracks.)

ataprobe v1.0 (c)1995,96 by PAP den Haan

location : primary master
identify sector :
0: 045a config = Ata FixedDevice
1: 3fff cylinders = 16383
2: 37c8 (reserved)
3: 0010 heads = 16
4: 0000 0000
(vendor specific)
6: 003f sectors/track = 63
7: 0000 0000 0000
(vendor specific)
10: 2020 2020 2020 564e 4334 3032 4134 4348 594a 3541
serial number = VNC402A4CHYJ5A
20: 0003 (vendor specific)
21: 0e8f buffer size = 1863 KB [obsoleted by ATA-2]
22: 0034 ecc bytes = 52
23: 5641 344f 4135 3241
firmware rev = VA4OA52A
27: 4943 3335 4c30 3830 4156 5641 3037 2d30 2020 2020
2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020
model number = IC35L080AVVA07-0
47: 8010 r/w multiple = 16 sectors/block max

etc. etc.